Important, encouraging reporting.
Eloquent, rational analysis of the social intersections between middle-class working Americans and working-poor Americans, and the surprising daily efforts by bosses, teachers and healers to level this uneven economic playing field.
Sociologist Dodson (Don’t Call Us Out of Name: The Untold Lives of Women and Girls in Poor America, 1998) began researching what would become this book by studying the day-to-day balancing acts performed by working-poor parents in their efforts to raise families. In 2001, her focus shifted when one interview subject, a middle-class grocery-store manager, asked Dodson if she was curious how he ethically dealt with employing a low-wage workforce who couldn't support themselves on what he paid them. The author consequently discovered that in response to a market that seemingly institutionalizes poverty among its workers—one in four working Americans earn less than $19,000 annually—many supervisors, teachers and health-care workers simply break rules to secure the well-being of their workers, patients and students. Dodson’s conclusions are quantifiable and surprising. Managers break the guidelines they were trained to follow because, as many tell her, “being asked to collude with rules that are immoral and treat people unfairly eventually will lead to acts of disobedience.” Teachers openly reject curriculum and regulations that regard students as socioeconomically equal when, as most teachers note, they are anything but. Health-care workers cheat on insurance forms to care for uninsured patients. Dodson writes clearly and unsentimentally about this unorganized grassroots movement, grounded in notions of economic morality and spearheaded by everyday workers operating in the front lines of America’s current recession. The author rejects as conditional and subjective the American middle-class ideal of economic self-reliance and offers an alternate five-part solution to the worst social stratification since 1928. At the heart of this movement toward equality are common people who, Dodson writes, “reach the point where they break the rules—seek a moral underground—in order to treat others as they would be treated because, finally, that is the heart of decent society.”
Important, encouraging reporting.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59558-472-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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